Consider a familiar example of deferred ostention: pointing to a parked car just dented by a runaway driver, one says ‘he is going to have a bad day’, succeeding in referring thereby to the car’s owner. In deferred ostention, a demonstration picks out from the context an object or event; this is not the referent of the indexical to which the demonstration is associated, but an auxiliary with wh...

A listener’s ability to utilize indexical information in the speech signal can enhance their performance on a variety of speech perception tasks. It is unclear, however, whether such information plays a similar role for spectrally reduced speech signals, such as those experienced by individuals with cochlear implants. The present study compared the effects of training on linguistic versus index...

Studies of change detection have increased our understanding of attention, perception, and memory. In two innovative experiments we showed that the change detection phenomenon can be used to examine other areas of cognition-specifically, the processing of linguistic and indexical information in spoken words. One hypothesis suggests that cognitive resources must be used to process indexical info...

According to recent proposals in formal syntax, the left-most position in the C(omplementizer)-layer is dedicated to the representation of the context of utterance (call this hypothesis LP). This idea has had little impact on semantic theories of indexicals. The reason is that indexicals are regarded, after Kaplan’s (1989) Logic of Demonstratives (LD), as directly referential and rigid. However...

From the ecosocial to the biosemiotic Although many pay lip-service to the view that signs are common to culture and biology, it remains unclear how such a unity could emerge. Indeed, while those working with culture usually ignore biology, biologists rarely consider how their observations bear on issues of meaning. So, when sign-making is studied, its outcomes are usually interpreted either ag...

Speciesists believe that membership in a particular species is morally relevant. Morally relevant properties entitle their possessors to have their interests considered preferentially relative to those individuals who lack that property. Those dispensing consideration incur obligations or, minimally, options, to act with bias. As a matter of fact, all known speciesists are human speciesists, no...

It is widely agreed that the references of indexical expressions are fixed partly by their relations to contextual parameters such as the author, time, and place of the utterance. Because of this, indexicals are sometimes described as token-reflexive or utterance-reflexive in their semantics. But when we inquire into how indexicals help us to identify items within experience, we find that while...